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Sep 19, 2019

Bowery Flowers — The Green Spark Behind NYC's 1980s Bicycle Revival - Streetsblog New York

As I wrote in Bicycle Uprising, the Midtown bike ban telescoped years’ worth of livable-streets organizing into weeks. TA’s volunteer base tripled and tripled again with writers, artists and layout designers who infused City Cyclist with verve and polish. Carl was less at the center but still present. One evening, as I was readying my chart of NYPD crash stats — numbers that we hoped could dispel cyclists’ bad rap as pedestrians’ menacers — he softly suggested changing my wonky heading, “NYC Traffic Accidents,” to the far more telling “Who’s Really Getting Hurt?” That was Carl: don’t correct, suggest. Don’t twist the arm, just twinkle the eye. And cut to the chase. In a few years both of us would rotate off the Trans Alt board. Carl went first, explaining that he had nothing left to teach me. That may have been the finest compliment I would ever get, until some years later, when the mail brought Carl’s first book of poetry, Bowery Flowers, I saw this (“o chief lark of man” is my name anagrammed): The front cover of “Bowery Flowers,” a book of poems by Carl Hultberg. o chief lark of man green from the beginning subtle calculator of change modest through accomplishment urban bike rider now not so strange foresaw the slippery social shifts crunching energy creating lanes taking out the avenue with bikers e...